The Innkeepers
DIRECTED BY TI WEST
Ti West’s 2009 The House of the Devil was a satanic throwback that combined the classically ’80s babysitter-in-peril scenario with the minimalist menace of early Polanski. With his follow-up, The Innkeepers, West attempts a trickier coupling, applying his slow-burn, few-frights-until-the-final-reels formula to the Gen X sub-genre of the slacker comedy. Perhaps inevitably, the results are less cohesive, and considerably less unsettling. The Innkeepers may be about a haunted hotel, but given its vaguely ’90s vibe and its well-worn central spook story (less bloodcurdling than quaint), West’s latest doesn’t evoke The Shining so much as it does former YTV after-school staple Are You Afraid of the Dark?
As though submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society, The Innkeepers concerns the tragic tale of Madeline O’Malley, the broken-hearted bride rumoured to haunt a storied Connecticut rooming house known as the Yankee Pedlar. Legend has it that her spirit is the longest-lingering of all the visitors to the century-old inn, which has fallen on hard times, and is about to close its doors.
During the Pedlar’s final weekend, front desk duties fall to a work-shy skeleton crew, consisting of Luke (Pat Healy) and Claire (Sara Paxton). As part of their work-avoidance strategy, the pair become determined to obtain clear proof that the Pedlar’s various creaks and groans are, in fact, paranormal in origin. They take turns patrolling the halls with an EVP device Luke uses to make recordings for his amusingly primitive “Real Hauntings” website.
Paxton and Healy share an authentically geeky rapport. The former, in particular, is charmingly plausible as a professionally aimless, socially awkward asthmatic. But in playing lengthy segments of the movie for laughs, West struggles to achieve the sustained sense of muted dread that defined The House of the Devil. What’s more, though he delivers some well-crafted scares in the predictably frantic finale, he also resorts to the sorts of “don’t go in there!” clichés that, while a fixture of the genre, feel like a betrayal of his unusually credible characters. The film’s epilogue, in contrast, dispenses with the one cliché that would have been most welcome: Although well-spun ghost yarns typically end with a spine-tingling revelatory flourish, The Innkeepers bows out with an anticlimactic head-scratcher.